New Year’s Greetings from Jolla!

Today it’s time to close 2015 and enter into a new exciting year. 2015 has been a memorable year for us, to say the least. Sailfish OS has matured substantially this year, evolving to Sailfish OS 2.0 and supporting multiple form factors. Even though we’ve said it often, now we really feel that the software is ready for scaling, and new partners are able to utilize it easily and powerfully in their projects. In the summer of 2015 we were honored to announce the first major licensing deal with India’s largest smartphone vendor Intex Technologies. We’re super excited about this partnership and look forward to making a new Sailfish OS powered smartphone available in India by spring 2016. As mentioned in Antti Saarnio’s previous post we also have some other exciting projects cooking and we can’t wait to tell you more about those as soon as they mature.

In November 2015 Antti Saarnio talked about the start-up life of Jolla at SLUSH 2015 explaining also the death valleys we’ve faced along the way. Right after the SLUSH event Jolla as a company had to face its hardest challenge so far, as we learned that our C financing round was hit by some unexpected delays, putting the entire continuation of the Jolla story in jeopardy. This naturally affected the whole operation of the company, as we also had to temporarily lay off a big part of our staff. Our dear community was also there to support us through the toughest times; check out e.g. the absolutely brilliant initiative ISupportJolla. Again, huge thanks for the support folks. It means the world to us!

In December our skillful team managed to solve the immediate financing struggle, and Jolla was back in business, meaning most importantly that Sailfish OS development can continue. The boat was of course hit hard by this, and now we’re in the process of getting operations up and running again.

Jolla Tablet project

During 2015 we also worked hard on the Jolla Tablet project, which was first introduced in November 2014. Our very talented team made a lot of progress in the project, and the first small batch of Jolla Tablets were shipped in the autumn to our Indiegogo contributors. The project altogether had some serious unexpected setbacks in the autumn, and we were forced to postpone the whole project schedule many times – these were communicated in several blog posts along the summer and autumn.

The serious financing challenge in November-December had unfortunately a bigger impact on this project than we could even anticipate. Now that our financial situation has improved and we are slowly starting to get back to the normal operations, we are actively planning the best way to finalize the project and to find a solution that fits to both all you dear Jolla Tablet contributors and to our future business plans, together with our investors.

We don’t have all pieces of the puzzle figured out just yet, but a few things are now certain: we are happy to say that we will be shipping an additional small batch of the Jolla Tablet to early backers during early 2016, targeting to send invitations during January. The bad news here is that we are not able to complete the production to fulfill all contributions. In other words, all of our backers will not get a Jolla Tablet. However, you can be sure you will not end up empty handed. We might even have some positive surprises in stock for you. But more on that will follow, feel free to speculate!

Moving to 2016

Year 2016 is definitely going to be a year of growth for Jolla in many ways. As said, we now need to get the operations running efficiently again to support all the current and upcoming customers of Sailfish OS, and also to answer to the needs of all new business partners. Next year we are looking to scale Sailfish OS into new levels through new partnerships – recently we have had a huge increase in the interest towards Sailfish OS licensing from different kinds of device vendors.

We are sure that the year 2016 will very interesting and successful for Jolla and Sailfish OS after such a challenging and stormy year as this one. Let’s make 2016 a great year for Jolla and Sailfish OS – together!